American Bee Journal • October 2020 Vol 160 No 10 • The Classroom

In a perfect world, the frames of honey removed would be filled, capped and ready for the extractor; but at the end of the season, one gets partially capped frames. If the honey does not pass the refractometer test, how does one cure or age the honey and how long? Note — we live in a very dry part of the west.

If we can mix the honey, what is a good rule of thumb in doing so? I do know my honey harvested crystallizes very quickly once bottled.

Thanks for the questions. First, honey bees make honey from nectar. Nectar is, essentially, sugar water that many plants produce. The moisture content of nectar is much too high for the bees to store it. If they were to store it as nectar, it would be prone to fermenting in the comb. Thus, bees convert the nectar to honey via the addition of enzymes and by evaporating off a lot of the moisture. Generally speaking, honey is most stable between about 15.5 and 18.5% water and this can be measured using a refractometer. Bees usually cap cells containing honey somewhere around those moisture levels.

As you state, it is best to harvest honey from frames that are 100% capped. This is not always possible so the general rule-of-thumb is that you can harvest frames that are ≥75% capped. If you do this, your honey is usually within the target moisture range.

Despite this, biology often works against us. It is pretty common for supers not to be fully capped by the end of the honey production season. This can happen when people oversuper (i.e., put on more supers than the bees can fill/cap) or if a nectar flow stops suddenly. Bees need incoming nectar to secrete the wax necessary to cap honey cells. A cessation in incoming nectar means the bees will stop capping cells. All of this can lead to you having supers that are not capped fully.

What do you do when this happens? I know some beekeepers will take their supers that contain mostly uncapped frames and put them in a small room that is heated and that contains a dehumidifier. This can help reduce the moisture content in the honey. You, then, can stop the process when the honey is within the appropriate moisture range (use the refractometer to check). When this happens, you would be free to extract the honey.

Some beekeepers even devise ways to reduce the moisture content of honey after it has been extracted. They usually do this by heating the honey in the settling tank, stirring the honey, and having a dehumidifier in the room. Some equipment manufacturers even sell machines that reduce the moisture content in honey for you. So, you have quite a few options for reducing the moisture content of extracted honey.

You specifically mentioned mixing honey to dilute your moist honey with a dryer honey. There is no set ratio of dry:moist honey that you need to follow. You would simply mix the moist honey into the dry honey until you achieve your desired moisture content, as determined using your refractometer. One word of caution here: Do not dilute your moist honey if it has begun to ferment. Doing this can cause the entire batch to ferment.

Believe it or not, I think honey moisture content is a very common problem for beekeepers. I travel all the time and people always want to give me a jar of their honey (which I welcome with open arms and an open stomach). However, the vast majority of the honey I receive this way is fermented. I have come to appreciate that many beekeepers struggle to know if their honey is fermented. Fermented honey has a unique smell and taste (much like a hint of a rotting fruit or an alcoholic beverage). Fermentation is not reversible; so it is very important to ensure that the moisture content of your honey is not too high.

I am a beekeeper in north Florida and my gallberry crop was dismal. May was quite dry; however, I had my hives on a river. Perhaps I did not have enough workers? Most hives were a single deep with a honey super. I donated frames of brood from my nucs to try and have as many bees as possible without overcrowding them to the point of stimulating swarming. As I understand it, timing is critical and having the right number of bees at the right time is the name of the game. Maybe it was just the weather? I have also heard or read somewhere that you never want more than ten hives in a bee yard for honey production. I had 18 hives in one place and just curious if that had a negative impact on per hive honey production?

There are actually quite a few possible reasons for the poor honey flow you experienced. It sounds like your bees were in good shape and that you had bees to spare. Assuming this was the case, the rest really is up to Mother Nature. Sometimes, the weather is too bad for bees to forage consistently during the flow. Other times, it may be too dry, or too wet, for the plants to produce nectar. Some plant species might have bumper crop years but have a few down years in between the bumper crops. Perhaps the density of gallberry was not sufficient to provide the amount of nectar you anticipated. Maybe the plants in the area have a disease that affects their production. Perhaps your bees swarmed a lot. As you can see, a lot of things can cause the unfortunate year you had.

You ask specifically about hive density in an area and how that can contribute to poor honey crops. Many commercial beekeepers who keep bees for the purpose of honey production target 20-50 colonies per apiary. I think ~30 colonies per apiary is the norm. It is possible that there simply is not enough nectar available for the 18 hives you keep. My gut tells me that is not the case in your situation and that one of the other reasons I listed might be more responsible.

With all that background, it is important to determine, or at least get a general feel for, (1) the number of colonies an area can support, and (2) if the area is a good honey producing area. Some areas are just bad. Where I live is a good example. There simply is not enough nectar in my area to produce marketable honey. Unfortunately, you can only answer these questions if you have your bees in an area for three years or more. I usually chalk it up to natural variation if I have one bad year in a new area. I call it a trend if it happens twice. After my third bad year, I find a different place to keep my bees.

One good way to get around this, or at least get a good sense of the quality of forage in an area, is to talk to other beekeepers in your area to see what density of bees they run in an apiary and how much honey they can expect per colony. I find this to be a very helpful strategy in my search for honey producing sites.

Drone frames in conjunction with the removal of drone brood is used as a way to mitigate Varroa infestations. This is just one of several ways to control Varroa populations. Living in Southern California, which is populated by Africanized bees, I have a concern that this is a harmful beekeeping practice. By intentionally reducing the populations of genetically preferred drone bees, we are unintentionally contributing to the spread and increase of undesirable Africanized populations. Do you have any thoughts on this practice, and do you know of any studies that have been conducted to evaluate the benefits/ harm of this practice?

Drone brood removal is a method that some beekeepers use to reduce Varroa populations in their hives. Varroa are more attracted to drone brood than to worker brood. You can purchase foundation that is made for drone-sized cells. Workers bee construct drone cells on this foundation and queens lay unfertilized eggs in the comb. This results in a solid frame of drone brood. The premise here is that Varroa are attracted to the developing drones and they preferentially invade these cells. You wait until the entire frame of brood is capped, remove it from the hive, and then freeze it for 2-3 days, killing the drones and Varroa. You put the thawed frame back into the hive later and the bees will clean out the dead brood/Varroa and the entire process starts over. Research has shown that this method does, in fact, reduce Varroa populations, although it is quite labor intensive as you note. I recommend checking out information about this practice on the Honey Bee Health Coalition’s website. Just Google “Honey Bee Health Coalition Varroa” and you will be led to a PDF in which this practice is discussed. Furthermore, they have a video on their website that shows you how to use the practice.

With that background, your point about destroying your drones in an area where African honey bees are present is well taken. For the benefit of the reader, I will remind everyone that virgin queens leave the hive to mate with drones from colonies nesting in the nearby area. These drones will originate from your managed colonies, other beekeepers’ managed colonies (if any beekeepers are in the area) and feral colonies. Where African bees are present, a high percentage of the feral honey bee population can be Africanized (i.e., they usually are your feral colonies). When your European-derived colony goes queenless, they will raise a queen that is, herself, European-derived. However, she will leave the hive to mate and may end up mating with Africanderived drones present in the area. When this happens, your colony can become Africanized.

Now to your question: I do not recommend using drone brood removal as a method of Varroa control if (1) you live in an area where African honey bees are present AND (2) you allow your colonies to requeen themselves naturally. You are right: This can stack the deck in favor of the feral African honey bee colonies and you can have downstream problems in your apiary later. However, there is something that you can do to have the best of both worlds. You can practice drone brood removal and requeen your colonies yearly with queens you purchase from a certified producer of European- derived honey bees. When you do that, you do not have to worry as much about the impact of the feral African honey bee population. Just make sure that you requeen any colony that requeens itself naturally and becomes defensive before you are ordinarily scheduled to requeen the hive. For example, let us say that you requeen all colonies every March. Then, a colony goes queenless in August and you do not want to purchase a second new queen for it this year. You can allow it to requeen itself and then requeen it if it becomes defensive.

Honestly though, if I were you, I would find a different way to control Varroa and allow my colonies to rear drones to adulthood. I think there is some benefit to allowing your colonies to produce drones when African bees are present in the area.

I was treating my older hives with Formic Pro, which instructs that the pads be placed between the two bottom brood chambers. While I was doing that, I noticed that the comb is old, very dark, and remembered that the cells get smaller as the years go by. So I took out two frames that were full of honey but no brood (there was brood in the next frame) and put in two new frames of mostly drawn out comb. But does not most/all the old stuff need to be replaced? That is kind of hard to do, with brood being in a lot of the frames, and having to move four supers off the top, and the general upset of taking the hive apart.

This is an interesting series of questions/ comments. Let us start from the top. First, pure beeswax is a creamy white color. Bees secrete it from glands underneath their abdomens this way. The comb darkens as it ages and this darkening is related to use. Bees have dirty feet. There are residues of cast skins, pollen, staining, etc. in the combs. This is especially true of the comb in the brood nest. It only takes one cycle of brood being reared in the comb before the comb starts to turn brown and then black.

As you note, brood cells get smaller in diameter over time. This is because larval honey bees deposit silk while developing. This builds up in the cells after repeated brood rearing cycles. The end result is a darkening comb whose cells get smaller in diameter. All of this is quite natural and should not cause concern.

The primary reason people want to rotate out old combs is due to possible pathogen or pesticide build-up in the comb over time. There is some research showing that rotating out old comb can improve hive health, though there is no agreement in the literature as to how old comb actually is when it is “too old” to be used. I know some beekeepers who never rotate out old comb. I know others who only allow a comb to remain in a hive ~2 years. I think the benefit to bees comes somewhere in the middle, probably around five years.

Some beekeepers go “all in” when rotating out combs. They will remove all combs in the brood nest at one time. In this case, they put a queen excluder above the brood nest and add an empty brood box above the excluder. Then, they would move the old combs from the brood nest into the deep box above the excluder. Next, they put frames of foundation or comb that has been pulled recently into the empty space created in the brood nest. This rotates new combs into the brood nest all at one time. They allow all the brood to emerge from the old comb above the excluder and then remove those combs from the hive once done. At this point, I would recommend melting down those combs in a solar wax melter so that you can recover the wax to sell or use to make crafts/candles. As you can imagine, this is energetically taxing on the bees as they have to build new combs from scratch. On the other hand, it removes all the old combs at one time, which is likely the better of the possible strategies.

Other beekeepers only remove a few combs from the brood chamber every year. If the standard brood box has ten deep frames, the beekeeper may rotate out two combs per year from that brood box. The combs, then, will end up being replaced on a five-year cycle, with only 20% of the combs being replaced in a given year. You can keep track of this by marking the top bars of the frame in some manner consistent with the year they were placed in the hive. My only problem with this slower rotation method is that the new combs immediately get exposed to the same contaminants in the other combs that were not removed. I think going all-in may be best. You can always do a subset of colonies each year so that not all colonies are investing in the production of new comb every fifth year.

I have heard or read somewhere that one should avoid feeding honey to a hive that did not come from that hive. With that said, should one avoid placing an extracted super on a hive that it didn’t come from? I only have a few hives and it is a challenge to keep track of what hive a super comes from. My hives are numbered and I also number my supers.

You are correct that it is generally taught that you should avoid feeding honey from one colony to bees from another colony. The idea is that the honey can contain disease organisms (most notably, American foulbrood spores) to which the second hive will become exposed if you feed them another colony’s honey. However, commercial beekeepers do this all the time, not really with extracted honey, but more so with frames of honey (or supers of honey) that they move between hives. You are 100% correct … it is inconsistent to say that you should not feed one colony another colony’s honey, but that it is perfectly ok to move brood frames, other combs, or supers between colonies. All practices can spread disease organisms. So, it has long been odd that one practice (feeding the honey) is discouraged while the others (moving brood, supers, combs, etc.) are endorsed. What to do?

Here is my take. First, I do not feed my bees extracted honey unless it came from my colonies that I have been able to monitor directly. Even then, I rarely have a reason to do it. I also do not give my bees frames from other people’s hives, supers from their hives, etc., unless they treat for diseases and pests AND I am allowed to inspect for diseases and pests before I move these into my hives. Frankly, I do not trust anything that I do not control directly.

Nevertheless, I routinely move frames of brood/honey/pollen between my hives, supers between my hives within an apiary, etc. This is an incredibly common practice in beekeeping. Yes, it can spread diseases. However, I think trying to keep frames/supers/etc. separate by hive is more work than it is worth in the long run. My recommendation is that you control the diseases and pests that you can and regularly monitor for these biotic stressors. If you do this meticulously, you can feel pretty comfortable moving equipment between hives within an apiary. You will make the occasional mistake, but I do not think it will be catastrophic in the long run.

Earlier this spring while checking on the bees I noticed scattered remains, exoskeletons, on the top cover of the hive. They appeared to be clipped fragments of bees. Next time I passed by I noticed a red bird setting on the weight on the top cover of the hive. I was tickled to see what I thought was a scarlet tanager until I googled it. It called the tanager a bee bird, eating bugs and fruit. The question: Do these birds cause much harm to a hive? I noticed quite a few bee parts on the top cover over several days, I am just not sure how hard they are on the bees?

I placed a ceramic cat from the wife’s flower garden on the hive’s top cover to keep the bird away. I want to keep this bird friendly yet spare the bees the trauma, remember those flying monkeys in Oz.

Ok. I am jealous! I have never seen one of these birds but I think it is pretty neat that you have one around your house, even if it is eating your bees.

Birds can be a problem for bees, but I typically do not consider them a major threat to one’s colony(ies). I have never seen a bird cause a major population decline in any of my hives. I know that birds can be a major problem for bees in some parts of the world, but I just do not think this is something about which you need to be worried in this instance.

That said, birds can be a problem if they end up eating a queen on her mating flight. This can happen and, of course, could lead to problems for a colony that would possibly become hopelessly queenless. However, assuming you work your colonies frequently, you would be able to catch a queenless colony early in the process and monitor its requeening progress.

In some areas around the world, birds can be such a problem for bee colonies that beekeepers have to suspend bird nets above their hives. I have not heard of this happening anywhere in North America (though I am sure that comment will lead to emails from people who have had problems with birds ☺

As a final note, I think putting a ceramic cat on your hive is a neat idea. Did it work?

I am a first year bee keeper with four hives, three of my queens are VSH queens. I would like to do a brood break to help control Varroa, but do not want to lose my VSH queens. I was thinking I would just use queen cages to trap my queens in place during the break, but it has been suggested to me to use a reverse split instead, and then move the VSH queens back into the parent hives. I have two concerns with the reverse split: 1) I would need to purchase more nuc boxes, and 2) when I bring the queens back into the parent hive, what do I do with the frames in the nucs? There was no brood break in the nucs; won’t they have an uninterrupted population of Varroa?

I am really happy to hear that you use queens with the VSH (Varroa sensitive hygiene) trait! I adamantly believe that beekeepers should use queens that have been bred for resistance to Varroa, though not enough do. Thus, thanks for doing it!

I would not recommend caging queens to cause the brood break. Dr. Cameron Jack (from the University of Florida) and I conducted a study where we looked at caging queens, using oxalic acid, and using a combination of the two to control Varroa. In our study, caging queens did not help much and led to a number of downstream problems for the colonies (queens died, colonies did not recover, etc.). We used small cages like those used by some commercial beekeepers in Europe. One way around this is to confine a queen to a single frame using a frame cage. This gives her considerably more space than in the cages actually designed for the purpose of causing a brood break. The latter tend to be quite small.

Nevertheless, I would force a brood break a different way, at least until we know more about the impact of caging queens on colonies. I think it may work in some circumstances in certain locations. I am sure the time of the year we did it in Florida did not help. However, we just do not know enough about the practice yet for me to recommend caging the queen to accomplish this.

Despite this, you can force a brood break by simply removing all the brood from the hive and treating the broodless hive with something like oxalic acid. You, then, can use that brood (and some bees that go with it) to make nucs. I was once in Italy visiting with commercial beekeepers and they do this quite a lot. They would use the brood to make queenless nucs. The bees in the nucs would make their own queen, which would force a broodless period in those hives as well. Of course, you may not want all the extra colonies that would result from doing this. So, you could sell the nucs once the queen emerged/mated and you treated for Varroa in the nucs. The concerns you pointed out about the reverse split are appropriate, hence my recommendation of the strategy I mentioned here.

We have had bees since we took a class in 2008. We have always used Langstroth hives. For a variety of reasons, in 2018 we didn’t have any hives left. I decided to put everything away, and stacked up the woodenware in our garage. In 2019, a swarm flew into the garage and took up residence in the stored woodenware. My husband hived them, took good care of them, and they survived winter. The hive was strong in the spring, and he split it. We had one strong hive and one weak hive. Then a couple of months ago (May of 2020), another large swarm flew into the garage and took up residence in the stored woodenware.

We don’t know where these bees are coming from, although in the past we have had hives swarm. But if these are bees that were originally from our hives, they would have had to survive two winters. None of our close neighbors keep bees. We once saw a couple of hives at a neighbor’s about a mile down the road, but we haven’t seen those for about two years. It’s possible that somebody within foraging range is keeping bees and we don’t know about it. We live next door to and across the road from about 2,000 acres of forest. If these bees are living in the forest, why would they decide to come back and live in Langstroth hives? In any case, we now have three hives full of bees that came to live in our old woodenware. We know how lucky we are, but I wonder why this happened.

The short answer is that your stored woodenware is serving as “bait hives” for swarms looking for new nest sites. When colonies swarm, scout bees search for potential nest sites for the new swarm. They canvas the nearby countryside looking for nest sites that have certain characteristics. They prefer nest sites that are about 15 feet from the ground, are about 40 L (~10 gallons) in volume, have small entrances (~3 square inches) that are south-facing and near the bottom of the cavity, have cavities containing comb from colonies that occupied the cavity in the past, etc. Sometimes, these nest characteristics cannot be found in a single nest site. When this happens, the swarms will take the next best option, which is apparently the beekeeping equipment in your garage. Also, for this to happen year-after-year, you must have some colony(ies) nearby. Frankly, I think what is happening is pretty cool!

It is my understanding that Varroa are born as legged “larvae” and then pass through protonymph and deutonymph stages before molting into adults. Has any research ever been done on what hormones/enzymes (if any) are responsible to get the Varroa from one developmental stage to the next?

What I am getting at is, do Varroa produce substance(s) during their developmental stages that would be toxic to an adult Varroa such as cause the adults to soften or lose their hard exoskeleton? Could such substances be used for mite treatments without harm to honey bees?

The reason for this train of thought is that some years ago I read of an enzyme that hard shelled beetles naturally produce to get them from one developmental stage to the next, and when this enzyme was applied to adult beetles, they lost their exoskeleton and died. These beetles supposedly could not develop resistance to this enzyme as it is part of the beetle’s natural function.

On a different note, I am currently using oxalic acid as a mite treatment but would like to also use Formic Pro or Apiguard every other year to help keep the mites from building up resistance to any one of the above miticides.

But my question is, do oxalic acid and Formic Pro and Apiguard all kill mites with the same mode of action, or not? If so, then what good will it do for me to alternate from one of these miticides to the other to minimize Varroa becoming resistant to these miticides?

Wow, these are some pretty tough questions. Fortunately, we have a Varroa expert at the University of Florida. So, I passed your questions to him (Dr. Cameron Jack). Here is what he said [minor edits made]:

“The beekeeper is correct on his quick overview of Varroa development. I spent some time digging through the literature trying to find any hormones/enzymes specific to Varroa development that others have identified as targets. I suppose the tricky part of disrupting Varroa mating or development would always be delivery. As the mites reproduce and develop within individual honey bee brood cells, it would be difficult to target them effectively.

The beekeeper makes a good point that you would not want to continually use miticides that have the same mode of action because the mites could rapidly develop resistance. Fortunately, none of the chemicals he mentions (oxalic acid [OA], formic acid [FA] or thymol) have the exact same mode of action. We still do not know the exact mode of action of OA and that is an area that needs to be researched further.

-Formic - Though the mode of action is not well understood, FA likely inhibits electron transport in the Varroa mitochondria by binding cytochrome c oxidase.

-OA - While the mode of action for OA is not fully understood, OA kills Varroa upon contact and is also effective at dislodging mites as it increases honey bee grooming behavior.

-Thymol - Thymol is the most commonly used essential oil Varroa treatment and likely works against Varroa by binding to octopamine or GABA receptors.”

I haven’t seen or heard anything about the phorid fly threat to the honey bee for a while. What’s the current status?

As you note, there is a phorid fly (family Phoridae) that can parasitize honey bees. The press calls this fly the “zombie fly” and it was a hot topic 5-10 years ago. The press surrounding this pest has all-but-disappeared. For the most part, this fly is likely only a minor pest of honey bees. Let me provide a brief overview.

There are about 4,000 species of phorid flies and as a group, they have very diverse life histories. One phorid species, Apocephalus borealis, is of particular interest to beekeepers because of its propensity to parasitize honey bees (though bumble bees and paper wasps are their typical hosts).

The fly is quite small and resembles a small fruit fly. The female fly will inject eggs into its host’s abdomen. The larvae that emerge from the eggs will feed and grow inside the host. After feeding, they emerge from the bee in the junction between its head and thorax. This can cause the bee’s head to pop off its body. Once outside the body, the larvae transform to pupae and then adult flies in about 28 days. At this point, the lifecycle begins again.

These flies are called “zombie flies” because parasitized honey bees show “zombie-like” behaviors (as if zombies were real …). They leave their hives at night, are attracted to nearby lights, exhibit disoriented behavior, and end up dying in a few hours.

We really do not know what overall impact they have on honey bee colonies. My guess (which is just a guess) is that it is pretty minor. However, I could be wrong. My team and I wrote a document on this topic that I think you might find interesting. You can find it at: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/in1063.